In France, objects have a gender. For example, we say 'une table' (a table, feminine), 'une chèvre' (a goat, feminine), 'une maison' (a house, feminine), 'une lampe' (a lamp, feminine), but 'un robinet' (a faucet, masculine).
In France, objects have a gender. Is that weird for you?
Same as in welsh but we like to make life difficult here. Unlike French or German you can't tell by le, la, das or die. We've only got y and yr which have nothing to do with gender. Worse still there's no way of guessing if a noun Is male or female.
The problem is spellings of words here change or mutate according to lots of complex rules including gender
Cat = cath dog = ci Y gath ( fem) y ci (masc) The letter g just drops off female words Goat = gafr Yr afr
Then to make our lives miserable our some of numbers change before female gender nouns Dau becomes dwy 2 Tri become tair 3 so 3 dogs tri chi 3 cats tair cath Pedwar because pedair 4
Then adjectives change after a noun depending on gender The black dog y ci du The black cat y gath ddu
Little dog ci bach Little cat cath fach
Confused? three little white dogs. three little white cats tri chi bach gwyn. tair cath wen fach
And all you Frenchies have to remember is le and la.
It's not as difficult as people think, spelling and pronunciation is actually easier than English, it's the grammatical mutations everyone stuggles with, they matter on paper not so much in everyday speech. Welsh is heavily spoken in the North West but elsewhere the English to Welsh ratio varies from place to place. More often than not people speak a mishmash of both languages that reflects their own personal circle of friends.
No, most places are geared up for tourists, but you might find getting work difficult if the boss feels you wouldn't fit in with his welsh speaking employees. To make things worse north welsh is different to South welsh eg the woman likes milk in the North is mae dynes yn licio llefrith But in the South, it's mae menyw yn hoffi llaeth. You can of course mix them up and throw in some English words. An odd one is boxing, you either use bocsio which is from English or paffio which is Scandinavian.
It is and more than a little stupid frankly to my English view of sensibility.
There doesn't seem much rhyme or reason and you must just know. Why is vagina masculine in French? I'll rest my case at that.
I am glad object gender was removed in Middle English together with gendered endings of which blond is about the only one i. e a man is blond but a woman blonde. It is a French import as fair is the proper English
Language gender is one of the reasons I detest woke pronouns. A 101 genders in a language would be a nightmare
A good question, the reason for grammatical gender for nouns is considered random. As strange as it sounds. Plus, languages evolution can modify a gendered noun over time, time and space since Quebec French for instance considers that the word "job" is feminine while French from France considers that "job" is masculine.
But everything language is not logic-based, it's organic design with, sometimes, logic lol
But when it's not my daily life, when for instance I'm looking at german nouns, I'm like "what?", why don't they follow the gender logic of my own language? And then I realize, again, that language was born as a seed of random, with sometimes logic, and it lives on, evolves with randomness inside. Or at least, it looks random, until we can identify complex causalitywe overlooked? Fascinating perspective at least :)
Just say this question, speaking as an American who only knows English….
Yeah its strange, dare I say it sounds “foreign” to me (stupid joke, I know)
Objects shouldn’t have a ‘gender’ unless it is used primarily by that gender like take for example “sports bras” like that makes sense to be ‘feminine’, “boxer briefs” having that fly for men to pee out of would be ‘masculine’.
A faucet being masculine or a lamp being feminine makes 0 sense in my mind.
And the opposite is, logically, true lol. I've been using English for years, but it's still relatively odd to me to consider that a table has no gender. It has always been a she to me. Now, logic, there is little logic involved in languages, they are like buildings made of visible and invisible bricks, without any clear architect. It's organic.
@Maybe_Maybe_not Yeah you make a fine point that it is all about perspective, I might find French weird for that though you find it odd to find English doesn’t have that haha, little logic involved in languages is accurate & loved the part about the visible and invisible bricks, its organic yeah I agree. English has very weird rules too, must admit.
Why WOULDN'T it be weird? In French, Spanish, German, Russian, Hebrew, and probably a bunch of other languages, either the word for "mustache" or the word for "beard" is feminine. What the heck are you people DOING over there?
Not at all. I studied French for 4 years in high school, worked for a French company, and am also conversant in Spanish, both Latin languages, which typically have gender objects, unlike English, where most objects are neuter gender. Though we do usually call a boat or ship a she in English.
Old English had gendered nouns but ship was neutral. Its more likely because a ship is the same shape as a ladies bits and full of seamen. Fun fact. The Bismark was referred to as a he not a she.
Spanish and Polish do too, so it's not weird at all to me. It would be weirder if they had completely different words for masculine and feminine version.
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